


daisy chains and knives in bleeding hearts

by thepensword



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Character Study, Drabble, F/F, One Shot, POV Second Person, Season/Series 05, Tragedy, but in an artsy way, the end of the world but make it sapphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24202246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: You never meant to be either crusader or hunter. Now, at the end, you are both.(Basira and Daisy, at the end of the world.)
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 17
Kudos: 55





	daisy chains and knives in bleeding hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: (nothing super graphic but just to be safe) mentions of blood, violence, guns, knives, being watched, implied self-harm, self-hatred, loss, grief, guilt, dehumanization, and being controlled. implied character death but its ambiguous and open ended.
> 
> this is. sad.

You never meant to be either crusader or hunter. Now, at the end, you are both.

There is a story you read once. She bought it for you when your eyes had caught on the gold patterns of the cover, in the corner bookshop with the cat in the window. It ended up not being very good; a short novela, incredibly melodramatic, more saccharine than fits to your tastes, but it’s important to you for the simple fact that she bought it for you, back before everything went wrong. In it, a woman is cursed by a witch to turn into a beast, and her lover must slay her or lose the whole village to her claws. It was sweepingly dramatic and included a far-too-wordy description of the bloody wound upon the woman’s dying breast, but it was special for the memories that went along with it. You, curled up under a blanket, reading it aloud with all the drama you can muster, and her. Laughing. Fingers intertwined with yours. Knees pressed together on a couch not built for two.

You never thought that, in a broken world, both of you would be the beast. Her, cursed, running across the ashes of a dead world with blood on her teeth, and you, the hunter, sword raised to carve out your lover’s heart.

 _There is a flower within your heart, Daisy, Daisy. Planted one day by a glancing dart, planted by Daisy, Daisy. Whether she loves you or loves you not (for sometimes it’s hard to tell)—yet you are longing to share the lot of_ _hunter-prey_ _Daisy Bell._

Your hands are shaking on your gun and your eyes feel so heavy and dry that you think perhaps it’s been years since you rested. Maybe it has been; time isn’t real, anymore. You long to weep—you did, before—but you are hollowed out and empty. There is nothing left to cry. No screams inside your chest. Just the taste of iron on your tongue and the ash on your skin. 

There is much in your path that would stop you. The thorns and the witches and the angry villagers with pitchforks at the ready and the Eye. Ever the Eye, vast and staring above you, stripping away at the outer layers of your being to tear at the core and steal the beating of your heart, to catalogue and categorize and bind into the pages of a book. You grit your teeth so hard they crack and pull your coat tightly over your body, as if covering every inch of your skin with fabric will stop the relentless gaze of the Watcher That Sees And Knows All. You trace a hamsa into the dirt in some vague hope that it will protect you from the gaze of the Evil Eye (your mother had several hung about your house, and once you had felt both protected and unsettled. If it is to stop the Evil Eye’s gaze, why is it itself an eye?), before thinking better of it and scratching it away with the toe of your boot. The Beholding is not the Evil Eye, and no hamsa will hold it back. It sees all. It knows all. Every eye belongs to it.

Just before you scratch it away, the eye in the center of the hamsa’s palm seems to turn to look at you. You don’t try it again.

You will not be someone else’s story. Your life is not a novela in the corner bookshop with the cat in the window. You wear sunglasses you find on the periphery of a nightmare-land and rewrap your hijab to cover the lower half of your face and you wish that you could aim your gun at the sun’s pupil and open fire. 

Once, you break. You stop dead in your tracks and fall to your knees. You claw at your face and scream so loud that it scrapes at your throat and you pound your grief into the dirt until the ground itself starts to reach back, wanting to drag you under. Then you stand and start running again. There is no room for grief anymore. No room for rage, no room for hopelessness, and certainly no room for fear. Fear is, after all, an ending. If they catch you feeling afraid you will be caught forever, and you will never find her. 

_You will stand by her in wheel or woe, Daisy, Daisy. Daisy, Daisy. Daisy._

You tighten your hands into fists, tight enough that the bite of your nails in your palms draws blood. You keep running, and running, and running. Hunting. And one day (if there are even days, anymore)—

You find her.

She is...not her. Not anymore. Her eyes are wild, blood-red like poppies in June. Her fingers are claws and her teeth are fangs, grown so large that they no longer fit in her mouth. She is stretched out and twisted and so far from human that you barely recognize her through all the fur and blood and pieces of other creature’s flesh and she is not your Daisy anymore. This is not the lover in the story, ethereally beautiful even in her monstrosity, falling with blood-red lips and snow-pale skin upon the ground, smiling sadly up into her lover’s weeping gaze. This is a beast that has stolen _her_ from you.

You raise your gun. Your hands have stopped shaking. You made a promise and you intend to keep it. You have not seen your reflection since before the world shattered, but you are certain in this moment that you would look no less monstrous. You, too, are splattered in blood and dust and gore from the endless, hellish wasteland that the world has become. Above, the eye turns inwards and everything stops in the hanging breaths between you, your gun, and the beast that you once loved.

And then she turns to look and there is static in your ears.

_When the road’s dark you can both despise policemen and lamps as well. There are bright lights in the dazzling eyes of beautiful Daisy Bell._

For a moment, the blood-red of her eyes is broken, and you think you see her, small and fragile, trembling. She liked to be called Daisy. She said it seemed soft. She liked soft things, you remember. Fleece blankets. Silk scarves. Classical music. Chamomile tea. She would card her fingers through the strands of your hair and hum gentle music in the warmth of your bed. The soap she preferred smelled of lavender or rose or lilac or honeysuckle.

In her gaze, you see yourself, and your eyes have turned as emerald as the watcher above.

You drop your gun. It hits the earth with a clatter. You step backwards and your boots crunch over something—you don’t dare to look down but it sounds like bones. The blood in her eyes hardens to red and she lunges towards you.

You don’t have it in you to scream anymore. You fall as her body collides with yours, back hitting the ground so hard that the air is knocked from your lungs, leaving you gasping. Your teeth knock together and you taste blood. She is poised over you, ready to strike, ready to rip and rend and _kill_ and—

“Daisy,” you say. You don’t mean to say it. It spills from your lips in a stuttered gasp, like a dying breath or a plea for help. Like a sob. Like a goodbye. She pauses when she hears it, and her eyes flicker again. In them, you see your own frightened face, dusty and bloodstained and shattered like glass.

And then she is not a beast anymore. She is Daisy, crouched over you, thin blonde hair loose and matted as it falls around her face to tickle your cheeks and shoulders. Instead of fangs she bares human teeth, and instead of claws she holds a knife. Her eyes are still red, but they are human, and they are crying.

There is a plea there. _Promise me_ , she’d said. You remember what it had looked like when she lost control. You remember how relieved she’d been after the coffin, even weakened and broken as she was. You remember how she’d _loathed_ herself for the things she had done, the pure and unrefined disgust and revulsion in her voice as she’d spoken in quiet tones about the beast she had been since her childhood. You remember the book from the corner store. The one with the cat in the window. The lover-beast, sword through her heart, bloody breast pale beneath the moon. You remember her hand in yours.

On your back, between dust and bone, your fingers find the handle of your gun.

_Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy, all for the love of you._

“Basira,” she says, and the sky opens wide. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> :))))))))))
> 
> i'm well aware that nobody's gonna read this fic because this fandom hates wlw content apparently and daisira in particular but if you made it this far? i love you, thank you for reading. leave me a comment or visit my [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)/  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/thepensw0rd) maybe?


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